We won’t be playing The Witcher Remake any time soon. In fact, the remake might even skip this current generation of consoles. CD Projekt RED was quick to announce the game last month but it seems the studio’s focus is on other things at the time being. According to CEO Adam Kiciński, The Witcher Remake will only arrive after The Witcher 4.
If you put this into perspective, CDPR hasn’t even started working on The Witcher 4 yet. The game is still currently in the very early stages of pre-production. The studio is also ramping up development on the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel which will start development in 2023.
CDPR states that The Witcher Remake will be developed partially in parallel to The Witcher 4 but it will likely only take focus after the game’s release. Adam Kiciński says that after Polaris (The Witcher 4) is launched, the studio will focus all of its efforts on shaping The Witcher Remake.
Coming back to The Witcher Remake and when it will come, yes, it will come after Polaris (The Witcher 4), which is a consequence of how we think about this project. I think that The Witcher Remake will be based in big part on technologies from Polaris, so it will be developed partially in parallel to Polaris, but once Polaris is launched, everything for Polaris will be then in the final shape, and it will be partially reused in the remake.
Kiciński makes sense. The Witcher 4 is the first game that CDPR is developing using Unreal Engine 5. He claims that both The Witcher 4 and The Witcher Remake are being created on Unreal Engine 5 but the studio is using The Witcher 4 and its tools to lay the foundations for the remake.
It will be easier to craft the remake once the studio has mastered the tool of Unreal Engine 5 by making The Witcher 4.
CDPR also touched on the third Witcher game being developed at The Molasses Flood codenamed Sirius. Kiciński says it will be a very different game from the usual CDPR release library. The game is designed for a “broader audience”.
We are not guiding anything about the design of Project Sirius, so we are not talking about the size or what type of game it is. We just said that the design is to be accessible to a broader audience. There is a very clear business purpose through it because we have to prepare ourselves in the right moment to communicate the product to gamers, as the product is very different from anything we’ve released so far. We have to be sure that gamers first will understand properly what the game is about. That’s why we are not saying anything, and we are not describing what type of game and what kind of size the game is.